Yes, that’s the anthem of today’s technology pundit! No piece of evidence is too small to make a mountain out of! iPads lack bloated applications popular in the 1990s? Enterprise fail! Some site you’ve never heard of before says the iPhone’s coming in just weeks? Apple must be afraid of Samsung! Windows Phone devices sell better on one site than some other phones? They must be selling awesome!

Asay exhorts Microsoft to seize the day (two-plus years after Apple introduced a tablet that people actually wanted to use) and take back the enterprise night! Or something.

Apple has given us much with its pleasing-on-the-eye iPad. But what it hasn’t given us is a serious replacement for the lowly laptop or desktop. As much as magazines like MacWorld [sic] may hype it as “The New Business Machine”, the reality is that the iPad is only enterprise-ready in iFantasyLand.

Asay’s major complaint boils down to the fact that Pages and Numbers on iOS aren’t as full-featured as Microsoft Word and Excel. Well, not everybody needs or wants a full office suite, given that a certain amount of time has passed since 1997. It doesn’t seem to occur to Asay that there might be room for both iPads and the Surface in the enterprise. FLIP BINARY SWITCH FROM IPAD TO SURFACE. IPAD LOSE, SURFACE WIN.

While there’s plenty of good reasons to suspect that Google’s Android will prove Apple’s most serious mobile competition due to its enterprise apps and strength in emerging markets…

Wait, what? What?! So, let’s get this straight. The iPad = no good for business because it doesn’t have Word and Excel. Android, on the other hand, = good for business because blah blaggidity bloog blerg meep morp.

Correct the Macalope if he’s wrong (don’t get up, he’s not), but there are no versions of Word and Excel for Android, either.

This is not the first time the Macalope’s seen this sleight of hand. “Apple devices are no good for the enterprise because they don’t have X, but Android (which also doesn’t have X) is good for the enterprise because… well, because it’s not from Apple, that’s why.”

Yes, enterprises may end up writing all of this software themselves, and it’s also possible that “enterprise grade” is a misnomer, and Apple is redefining the enterprise experience by taking away all the cruft from over-engineered applications.

Finally, Matt’s making some sense. And he only had to get seven-eighths of the way through the piece to do it.

There will long be a core set of enterprise users who need Excel. It’s still hands-down the best tool for number crunching and a host of ERP systems provide plugins to feed data directly into it. But to assume that a lack of Excel and Word is crippling the iPad is to ignore what’s been going on in the enterprise market for the last two years and to misunderstand why the iPad’s been a success.

Which, admittedly, kind of fits a pattern for Asay.

Something from nothing

It takes a village to build a dumb iPhone rumor. A village made entirely of village idiots.

… and the disappearance of Steve Jobs may have been a turning point for American society.

The notion that America has turned into a Mad Max-style post apocalyptic nightmare since Steve Jobs died is absurd. Preposterous.

It’s been that way for years.

Innovation is no longer in Apple’s camp.

Because the phone that was designed and built while Steve Jobs was alive and CEO was not tear-drop shaped like a collection of the dullest knives taken from drawers across the globe wanted it to be.

Say, where did The Examiner get their information? Why, from Pop Herald, of course. They don’t have a link to “hot celebrity videos” like The Examiner does, but the Macalope is sure they’re rock-solid, nonetheless.

According to reports, Samsung’s Galaxy S3 is set to reach an impressive 15 million sales mark this quarter, 5 million bigger than the anticipated July sales prediction, and 10 million bigger than last year’s Galaxy S2 sales during the same period.

And, yet, still 20 million fewer iPhones than Apple sold—to actual people!—last quarter. But somehow we’re supposed to believe that Apple is going to rush iOS 6 and the iPhone 5 out the door in the next three weeks because of this terror.

Now, rumors posted online say …

Wow! “Rumors posted online”! With attribution like that, you know it’s going to be good!

… Apple wants its own piece of the pie and will launch the iPhone 5 two months ahead of the anticipated October release date.

In its bleak earnings report today, Nokia revealed it shipped just 600,000 handsets in North America during its latest Q2 2012, down from 1.5 million in the same period last year. The 60 percent drop year-on-year, coupled with an identical ship rate in Q1 2012, shows that the company’s risky bet on Windows Phone is still a slow starter.

Initial sales indicators for the Lumia 900, Nokia’s most important U.S. Windows Phone to date, are showing that the handset is off to a good start despite the fact that the phone launched on Easter Sunday, a day when most AT&T stores were closed.

That was Wired’s Christina Bonnington on the Monday after the Lumia 900’s U.S. launch. You might wonder how the heck she could know already that sales were “promising.”

The Lumia 900 rose to the top of Amazon’s smartphone rankings today, beating out favorites like the Droid Razr Maxx, the previously most popular phone, and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Lookit me! I’m on top o’ the world, ma!

And, yet, somehow when actual sales were reported…

Nokia’s 600,000 figure encapsulates phones in general, rather than the specific smartphone segment, but it does show that analyst estimations of 330,000 Lumia sales in the US over a period of around four months may be accurate.

So.

What? Have? We? Learned?

Well, we’ve learned that you can’t judge the sales of a product based on its relative ranking against a subset of similar products (iPhones, for example, are not available on Amazone’s smartphone store) on the day of its launch.

Well, the Macalope didn’t “learn” that since he already knew that. But hopefully Christina did.

Not every trinket of information speaks volumes, pundits. Some of them are just shiny baubles that are best left alone.

[Editors’ Note: Each week the Macalope skewers the worst of the week’s coverage of Apple and other technology companies. In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]

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